Making Muskoka: Tourism, Rural Identity, and Sustainability, 1870–1920

For more than 150 years, people within and beyond Canada have characterized and sought out Muskoka as an archetypical space of wilderness tourism. Typical representations of this land of lakes, rocky outcrops, and conifers, today two hours north of Toronto by car, derive from objects and practices of summertime leisure. Yet the views of visitors, from the depths of Muskoka chairs or aboard various watercraft, have often overridden and obscured the complex, changing lifeways and worlds of Muskoka's Indigenous and settler residents. By privileging the perspectives of rural hosts rather than urban guests, Andrew Watson offers a fresh look at the first fifty years of tourism in this place.The lands within the watershed of the Muskoka River were traditionally and are still home to Anishinaabeg, the descendants of Algonquian-speaking First Peoples. Like other arable portions of northern North America, these lands were wrested from Indigenous stewards’ hands in the mid-nineteenth century and resettled by Euro-Canadian aspiring farmers. The poor soils along the Canadian Shield's southern margin stymied attempts at full-blown agricultural colonization, however. Some settlers left the region. Others sought survival through occupational pluralism: namely, some combination of agriculture, forestry, and tourism. The timing of these activities makes Muskoka both a unique case study and a revealing one, according to Watson. They arose simultaneously, rather than consecutively; tourism was no latecomer here, as elsewhere in North America. It was a constituent and consequential contributor to residents’ household economies from the first generation of resettlement.The book's central arguments hinge on the relationship between the three keywords in its subtitle: tourism, rural identity, and sustainability. Watson contends that the Shield's environmental constraints encouraged the formation of a unique “rural identity” for residents of Muskoka, one predicated on occupational pluralism rather than the monoculture of agriculture. Of all the occupations in which Indigenous and Euro-Canadian residents engaged, tourism, not agriculture or forestry, offered the surest path to sustainability between 1870 and 1900. That is, it held out the greatest potential for Muskoka's residents to “reproduce patterns of economic exchange, social relationships, and environmental conditions” (12) and thus to “construct, maintain, and reproduce their identity” in this specific rural space (13). From the turn of the twentieth century, however, exogenous economic, cultural, and energetic forces gradually made a local economy grounded upon tourism less sustainable.Watson pursues his thesis across five chapters. The first focuses on settlers’ early efforts to farm Muskoka with limited success, given its thin soils and rocky topography. The rural identities that developed in reply varied within the region. Tourism assumed a more prominent place among residents of the lower lakes, while wage labor in the logging industry became predominant among their counterparts of the upper lakes. Chapter 2 centers on Indigenous lifeways along the Shield's southern edge and how these changed in the late nineteenth century with the incursion of agricultural colonization and tourism. The latter offered Anishinaabeg as well as Haudenosaunee migrants from Quebec the means to maintain a seasonal presence in Muskoka and to continue pursuing valuable activities there. Guiding Euro-Canadian hunters through forests and selling traditional crafts to tourists yielded cash and enabled the refreshment and reproduction of traditional knowledge and skills across generations. This chapter is an important corrective to settlers’ longstanding erasure of Indigenous histories in Muskoka.The third and fifth chapters narrate the rise and decline of tourism as a sustainable livelihood for Muskoka's residents. Before 1900, tourists relied on and paid settlers to provide fresh food and ready fuel for their cottages and hotels. After 1900, the rise of mail-order catalogs and imported fossil fuels broke this symbiotic relationship, to the detriment of the local economy. Chapter 4 provides intriguing insight into small-scale wood-resource harvesting. Watson argues that this was a more sustainable, but ultimately less accessible, way for settlers to profit from trees than engaging with industrial logging in Muskoka.Making Muskoka draws upon rich and varied quantitative and qualitative sources, producing a sensitive, fine-grained portrait of early tourism along the Shield's southern rim. Watson's conceptualizations of rural identity and sustainability will inform and enlighten historical studies of places beyond Muskoka, too. Rightly challenging the common equation of rural with agricultural, he encourages scholars to explore historical nonurban identities emanating from other economic activities. Even more valuable is his reframing of sustainability as a historian's tool, as a means of assessing environmental, social, and economic change over time, in place, and among communities. For Watson, sustainability is not a fixed point but a spectrum. Economic activities can never be “completely sustainable, only more or less sustainable” (165). He concludes that tourism was most sustainable in Muskoka when its residents had greatest control over its workings, and he considers how twenty-first-century tourists could act differently to sustain Muskoka's local economy once again. I recommend Making Muskoka to all students and scholars of rural and agricultural history, especially those interested in hinterland regions, tourism, or sustainability.